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An anonymous reader writes "A man and his accomplice are accused of cheating on a Medical College Admissions Test (MCAT) by using a wireless pinhole camera and cellphone to send realtime images of the exam questions to a team of people supplying the 'correct' answers. One problem: the 'answer team' was tricked into the job by being told they were taking a test to qualify them as MCAT tutors. There were several clues the 'tutor exam' was bogus, including the poor quality of the images of the questions. Suspicious, the 'answer team' discovered the real MCAT test was occurring at the same time. They started feeding wrong answers to the accused cheaters and called campus security. The two accused cheaters now face several charges as a result."

It's more abhorrent since it's a medical test. I had the recent displeasure of working in an IT job related to med schools. From the bits and pieces that I saw of the more promising applications I processed, I'm truly horrified by the entire "profession". How could someone have such good college transcripts and MCAT scores yet write such stupid essays, I wondered? This explains a lot.

No, not really. If this were an exam that you take on the way out of med school, then yes, it would be more abhorrent. On the way in, all it does is mean that some people who shouldn't have been admitted will waste a whole lot of money unsuccessfully trying to pass classes that they weren't really ready for.

I'd expect that anybody who couldn't take the MCAT and do well on his/her own would wash out of med school anyway. It's not like you can keep up that sort of charade all the way through med school. When the prof asks you questions in class and you show a complete inability to think on your feet, when you can't pull off the most basic tasks during lab sections, or when you prove completely inept during your residency, they're gonna know that you're not cut out for a career as a doctor.

Basically, cheating works until you get caught. If you keep cheating, you will eventually get caught. The severity of the punishment tends to be directly proportional to how long you went without getting caught. Therefore, cheating is something that only a moron would do for very long. Ignoring the ethical question for a moment, this means that it can only be useful as a way of getting past some seemingly impossible hurdle like getting a near-perfect score on the MCAT so you can get into a top-tier medical school instead of having to settle for a lesser school.

So basically, it's not very likely that this would have any real negative impact on the quality of medical care (beyond the question of whether you'd want somebody with such poor ethical judgment taking care of you). And ironically, it might actually improve medical care if the lesser students went to the better schools and vice versa. In short, the only people who are really harmed by this are the other people taking the MCAT, who are competing against these alleged cheaters for spots in specific medical schools. This is not to say that the behavior is excusable, just that it is no more abhorrent than cheating on a GRE, an SAT, an ACT, or any other school entrance exam.

He's not condoning it. He's simply explaining that the post he is replying to doesn't have a valid concern and why, not saying people should cheat at anything. A car traveling at 60mph is a completely different situation when it's traveling toward you at 60mph. The GPP is saying the car isn't really coming at us at 60mph.

Taking my cue from the summary, you might be missing the "brains" axis.

I think that cheating is very high up on the abohorrent list... because "done right" it grows epic. The media likes to parade the dumb cheaters as a cheap schadenfreude ad-click generator. The smart cheaters blend it in better. So in your examples, the never did want to be a doctor - he just needs his degree to become a senior med insurance adjuster. His knowledge is good enough to know the vocab, and then using power plays he gets to c

Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.

I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.

After working at an answering service for 5 years, I've learned that doctors in the USA at least are duplicitous, technically inept (as in can't understand their pager doesn't work when turned off), and willing to lie left and right just to get a small discount on their bill.
I've stopped going to my doctor altogether because the board of directors at the affiliated hospital let us know that it might not be safe to be a patient of one of their doctors any more over a billing dispute.

I have less respect for doctors than I do lawyers, because at least the lawyer clients have some basis for an argument when they dispute their bill. All doctors know are cuss words, and I intend to drop my health insurance next open enrollment period because I'm sick of subsidizing these pigs.

I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.

What does a capitalist vs socialist economy have to do with how to test and qualify doctors?

I've stopped going to my doctor altogether because the board of directors at the affiliated hospital let us know that it might not be safe to be a patient of one of their doctors any more over a billing dispute.

If this is true, then you should publicize this behavior. Treating a patient differently, especially if, as you said, in a dangerous manner, based on who they work violates the rules of ethical behavior and codes on conduct.

Yep, and due to our horrible system we are attracting the very worst of them. MD means nothing to me anymore. They're the sleaziest of them all.

Here in Massachusetts, where we have some of the finest medical schools, we are legally obligated to buy their shit. Mitt Romney is now trying to explain why that's right for MA but wrong for the nation.

I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.

You make the mistake common mistake in believing that business wants capitalism. Nothing could be further from the truth. Capitalism is a system where ruthless competition between suppliers creates a system where the best quality goods and services are delivered for the best possible cost to the consumer. What business (what medicine has become) wants is protectionism. They want a monopoly and a guaranteed source of income without having to compete.

there is a reason the rich from other countries come here when they want a complex heart surgery.

So they only have to wait 3 days instead of 10?

Try comparing the billing you get for any procedure to that of someone who is not insured.

Sure. My wife went to the emergency room recently with a severe allergic reaction. They thought we were uninsured and sent us the full bill, which was $530. When they found our we had insurance, they billed our insurance company $3400, of which they paid $1100.00, and now the hospital want a $100 deductible.

If you think private insurance is a sane way to pay for health care you are a fucking moron.

Next time a "doctor" is about to put you under and saw through your sternum to operate on your heart, ask yourself the same question.

I hope if I get to that point (heart problems run in my family) I've another citizenship besides USA in a country that doesn't try to shoehorn capitalism into medicine.

After working at an answering service for 5 years, I've learned that doctors in the USA at least are duplicitous, technically inept (as in can't understand their pager doesn't work when turned off), and willing to lie left and right just to get a small discount on their bill.I've stopped going to my doctor altogether because the board of directors at the affiliated hospital let us know that it might not be safe to be a patient of one of their doctors any more over a billing dispute.

I have less respect for doctors than I do lawyers, because at least the lawyer clients have some basis for an argument when they dispute their bill. All doctors know are cuss words, and I intend to drop my health insurance next open enrollment period because I'm sick of subsidizing these pigs.

Boy, if you think doctors are inept now, wait until the bureaucracy takes over. Nothing spells incompetence like a bureaucrat. If you think medicine is a bad example, look at cars. Compare cars made by governments (Communist countries) to cars made by private citizens (capitalist countries) and tell me which one is more reliable, more efficient and safer? Now, ask yourself if you want your doctor to run like a Toyota or a Moskvitch.

There is a big difference between cars and medical care: You can figure out which car is a better buy. You can't figure out which doctor is a better doctor before you agree to pay them. Google "kenneth arrow healthcare" to see the seminal paper on this topic.

Every industrialized country other than the US has a solution to this: Experts who understand medicin evaluate medical procedures and outcomes per-doctor, and administer the medical system to do what individuals would do if they had better information. This leads to better outcomes at a lower cost. If you believe that the government can't do this, then please explain how 35 of them have outdone the US market-based system year after year for several decades.

Boy, if you think doctors are inept now, wait until the bureaucracy takes over. Nothing spells incompetence like a bureaucrat. If you think medicine is a bad example, look at cars. Compare cars made by governments (Communist countries) to cars made by private citizens (capitalist countries) and tell me which one is more reliable, more efficient and safer? Now, ask yourself if you want your doctor to run like a Toyota or a Moskvitch.

Compare the roads built BY communist countries (dictatorships) to the roads built BY capitalist (democratic) countries.

Both have bureaucrats building the roads. But democracies seem to build very good roads (generally speaking).

Capitalists didn't make cars safer...bureaucracy (safety regulation) did. Capitalists fought safer cars at every turn and still do today. Seat belts, air bags, crumple zones, mandatory safety tests, etc, etc, etc. All of it pure government bureaucracy keeping you and yours safe on American highways.

Canada has a life expectancy 2.5 years greater than the U.S. We have more smokers per capita, five times the number of donut shops per capita, and a province representing a quarter of our population who thinks a good meal is a plate french fries covered in cheese curds and gravy. I don't think you can say that Canadian lifestyles are significantly different from American ones in a way that accounts for that big a gap.

And there's more to health care costs than the efficiency of health care.

Communist countries sucked at stuff like building cars, but they had excellent scientists, doctors, and performing artists. To take the space race as an example: how do you think the Soviet union got the first satellite, the first man in space, the first unmanned orbit around the moon and return to earth, and the first unmanned mood landing, despite the unquestionably inferior economic infrastructure?

I'll tell you why, though it's rather obvious. People in these professions are strongly motivated by things beside economic success. And when economic success isn't really available as a goal, those motivations which you could give yourself (intellectual achievement, helping people and earning their gratitude and admiration, expressing yourself artistically, becoming "People's artist of the Soviet Union", "Hero of the Soviet Union" and the various other medals and awards they offered) become all the more important. It was the boring jobs the poor Soviet citizens sucked at - which unfortunately for them also include some damn important jobs.

Doctors in the wealthy world are inept now (despite their awesome infrastructure, enabled by us hordes of money-motivated individuals willing to do the drudgework to supply them with their tools) because they're not allowed to do what they want to do - help people. The business venture model of medicine is totally worshipped, so that a doctor becomes a conveyor belt-like producer of medical "services", five minutes per patient, I mean CUSTOMER, to follow the script slavishly, and always check the patient's insurance before deciding how and whether to help him.

Worship of business model-thinking is also endemic here in countries with so-called "socialist" countries. It's just that instead of checking the patient's insurance, overcharging and using the minimal amount of time, it's filling out the right kind of forms at every opportunity to make your administrator look good and secure funding, and then using the minimal amount of time.

> Now, ask yourself if you want your doctor to run like a Toyota or a Moskvitch

Funny you should mention Toyota. The success of Japanese cars owed a lot to Edward Deming, a business theorist who was as much a paternalist as a capitalist, and emphasized motivations beside money (in particular, pride in the quality of your work). In short, he tried to give assembly-line producers the kind of motivation doctors, scientists and performing artists already have. The Japanese embraced him, his American countrymen rejected his theories as sentimental, un-capitalistic nonsense (until they were forced to change, since everyone bought superior quality Japanese cars). Deming's theories are now mis-applied in education and medicine and responsible for a lot of the mess there, because the current generation of administators refuse to see how different those domains are from assembly-line production.

As witnessed by you, since you compare the working of a doctor to that of a car engine.

Wait, so in 2004 amid shart increases in revascularization in both Canada and the US, the US had a narrow (statistically significant, but narrow) lead in 5-year mortality after heart disease, and that's the deciding factor for which healtchare system is best?

When the US has declined in revascularization since then (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3072819/) and Canada has increased (http://www.qualitymeasures.ahrq.gov/content.aspx?id=15079&search=Aortocoronary+bypass+for+heart+revascularization%2C+not+otherwise+specified)?

Now, that doesn't necessarily mean the US was wrong to decrease its rate. The optimum might have been in the middle, or there might be some better new method.

I can't speak to that Daily Mail article, but it's of an entirely different calibre than your other evidence.

The fact that it's from the Daily Mail speaks for itself. The... I'm loathe to call it a "newspaper"... has a certain reputation [wikipedia.org] for panic-inducing sensationalist right-wing stories and a political agenda [wikipedia.org] which lends itself nicely to criticism of the National Health Service. I'm not saying their story was definitely wrong, but I'd give it a lot more credence if it was cited from practically any other source.

Since it could put lives in danger. Cheating on an exam for a pilot's license for instance would get you into similar trouble. (So could lying about your current qualifications as a pilot or experience). That's a glamorous example but basically any specialized job which requires qualifications, if you lie about them, could land you with a criminal record. And it makes sense. You don't want someone not qualified as an engineer designing a bridge. You don't want someone who doesn't know what they're doing with gas pipes installing a gas water heater. The potential for death and injury is just too high.

The only difference in this case is that it's a college entrance exam, not one for getting accredited or qualified, as others have pointed out. Still, I don't think someone cheating to get in is going to go straight and stop cheating once they are in.

404. Every one who falsely, with intent to gain advantage for himself or some other person, personates a candidate at a competitive or qualifying examination held under the authority of law or in connection with a university, college or school or who knowingly avails himself of the results of such personation is guilty of an offence punishable on summary conviction.

According to documents filed in provincial court in Richmond, B.C., Josiah Miguel Ruben and Houman Rezazadeh-Azar are each facing six charges including theft, unauthorized use of a computer, using a device to obtain unauthorized service and theft of data.

THESE are the charges? How about "conspiracy to commit murder," or "reckless endangerment?" These are the people who will be our medical doctors?!

"Oh, I really wanted to learn when I am accepted, honestly, I just wanted to cheat to get in and THEN I start to learn for real"

Sorry, but do you really expect someone who cheats for an admission test to stop there? They don't have the knowledge and skill to start a curriculum, how do expect them to pass without continued cheating?

Your rich uncle dies and leaves you $30 million but *only* if you complete medical school by a set date, but he didn't understand the timeline and set the date too soon to be realistic *unless* you connive your entrance *before* you've had time to master the entrance exam.

Of course, you could just walk into any admissions dept. with a lawyer attesting to the legitimacy of the will and the funds behind it, and explain how *very* generous you feel toward your prospective alma mater if the conditions of succes

Doctors are abusive, neglectful cheapskates. I've been told by the board of directors at a local hospital that it's not safe for me to go to their hospital any more over a billing dispute. If I ever have to deal with a doctor again, I'll be calling my lawyer, because after the threats I've received (on recordings I'd subpeona), I think it'd be easy for me to win malpractice against any area hospital.

One, and only one, of the following is true:

1) Absolutely all people everywhere of the same profession are identical in every way, and therefore the general conclusions about doctors you've drawn from your specific experience with one hospital are valid.2) You're a moron.

Not really--he just likely has a horrible local hospital and has never seen a good one, and he's generalizing because that's his experience with the profession. Humans generalize based on limited experience--it doesn't make them morons, it just gives them a limited information set, and reflects a tendency to overgeneralize. Most doctors lie regularly for insurance purposes and liability reasons--I'm generalizing, but I don't *think* I'm overgeneralizing, and even if I were, it would not necessarily mean I

I've been told by the board of directors at a local hospital that it's not safe for me to go to their hospital any more over a billing dispute. If I ever have to deal with a doctor again, I'll be calling my lawyer, because after the threats I've received (on recordings I'd subpeona), I think it'd be easy for me to win malpractice against any area hospital.

BULLSHIT! No doctor or board of directors for a hospital would be so stupid to open themselves up to the lawsuit such an admission would bring down upon them. Not to mention the loss of their license to practice medicine that would result from such a comment.

If given the choice of who to pick as a medical doctor would you rather have one person that thinks they know what they are doing, or a person smart enough to hire a team to double check his work. Just saying, you can't judge a persons skills just because they chose a more efficient way of by passing an unnecessary barrier to entry.

Oh and quit the hyperbole, no one was endangering any one here. This was not about practicing medicine, just about getting into an establishment to learn how to practice me

This is less about a barrier to entry than it is about ethics. They need to weed folks out in some fashion and I for one wouldn't want somebody that was willing to cheat on an exam to get an artificial boost into med school. On what basis would you suggest that the individuals would stop there?

They already weeded most people out by the shear lack of interest in becoming a doctor. Then of those that are interested, they automatically weed out all of those that can't or chose not to dedicate the next 10+ years of their life pursuing it. Then they automatically weed out all the people who can not afford medical school and do not qualify for scholarships or grants. Do we really need yet another way of weeding people out? Are there really that many people interested in becoming doctors that we nee

You can't make "suspected future intention to cheat on a licensing exam" a crime. The unauthorized use of a computer doesn't even make any sense, as well as using a device to obtain unauthorized access to a service. I'd be interested to see if they can make "theft" stick: the tests usually come with boilerplate preventing you from making unauthorized copies, but seeing as they paid for the test and were given it freely, that probably doesn't apply. The tests do usually come with boilerplate saying you can't make unauthorized copies, but that'd fall under contract violation, which is a civil violation, not criminal.

The thing is, they cheated, but that's not really illegal. It's wrong, but not illegal. They didn't endanger any lives; sure, they might have at some point, but they didn't actually do anything yet. They shouldn't be allowed into medical school, they should never be doctors, but they shouldn't be arrested.

I was thinking the same thing. A decent lawyer will make the case that a crime wasn't committed. Seems to me like you really can't pass a sensible law against cheating on a scholastic entry exam, but you could create a contract which provides suitable penalties for cheating.

If they did nothing illegal, keeping them out of medical school is clearly discrimination.

You can call it discrimination between qualified and unqualified people, but it is still discrimination and they can probably sue to gain entry. I'd say with some juries they might stand a pretty good chance of winning a lawsuit.

In the US at least, there's no law against discrimination on the basis of the ability to pass admissions tests that are rational. (They may not even have to be rational if the school isn't government--I'm not sure off-hand.) I suppose there could be one in Canada... I can see the fights in the press over it now... but it would be a remarkably stupid, dumb, stupid (and maybe redundant) idea that tends to show off the most inefficient and dumb (and redundant) parts of Canadian government.

Neither of those things are recognized as crimes, and neither of those things are the crimes that the student was charged with.

The first case is simply ridiculous; the MCAT isn't an admission exam, it's closer to the SAT, where you take the test and are given a score on a scale up to 45. Medical schools then look at that score, in conjunction with other things, when deciding whether to admit you. Secondly, admission to a school is nothing like intellectual property, other than the fact that neither is a ph

Sure. Who else are they going to hire as designated fall guys for when excrement encounters rotary cooling devices? Granted, they wouldn't want all their employees to be this dumb, but having a subset of their employees like this seems obviously beneficial. The guys are technically competent, and logistically incompetent. IE, they'd make perfect fall guys--capable of performing their technical jobs, but not capable of outplanning their bosses when they've been setup to fail.

Sure. Who else are they going to hire as designated fall guys for when excrement encounters rotary cooling devices?

You're right.Unfortunately, seems to be valid in a larger context than only CIA/ASIO - I'm seeing quite frequently some managers (at least in IT) doing the same; for the said managers, doesn't seem to mater that the delivery capacity is impacted: the hired persons just need to be cheap, then it's quite easy to use them as screens for the excrements.

Indeed, the CIA actually wants people that know what they're doing. They'll train agents on any cheating and trickery that's necessary to do their job, but most agents don't need that type of thing for their jobs. The CIA employs a surprising number of people in support roles doing things like analysis.

The MCAT is incredibly difficult. If you don't know the answers, there is very little room to use your multiple-choice-guessing skills like you were able to do on the SAT. Someone who - let's be realistic - probably cheated their way through their undergrad has just about zero chance of getting a score good enough to get into any medical school.

I don't know what the moral here is, though. Cheaters never prosper? That can't be right... Cheaters seldom prosper? No...

The secret to a good score on the MCAT is to ignore verbal (everyone does very well, so the difference between an 11 and a 14 is not how many you answered wrong, but which specific question you got wrong) and know chemistry and physics cold. The Physical Sciences is nothing but chem and physics, and Biological Sciences includes organic.

Yeah, if you're dead-set on a top-ten school, the mid-30s score might not cut it, but it will get you into one of your state's allopathic schools - and unless you are sure you want an academic career, where you went to school matters far less than what your Step 1 and 2CK scores are when it's time to find a residency.

That may be true - I've no way to know - though my advice really is only about the best way to get a higher overall score. Most premeds major in biology to try to get a leg up on the med school courses (not a bad idea, really, because it does work), but correspondingly stint chemistry and physics (because there's precious little of either in med school). There's thus a slight competitive edge to doing well where they do poorly - in particular, the existence of organic chemistry in the biological sciences se

Aye, similar to my reaction, which was, "The real story here is that there is a market for this kind of cheating assistance. How many unqualified people have made it past MCAT screening this way? Have any of them provided care for me or my loved ones?"

What qualifications are required to get into the military? I don't think they are comparable to either PE or M.D. (and thus may not induce cheating), yet military personnel in some cases may have more potential of killing "wrong" people.

Pre-med students spend their undergraduate days obsessing over that test, learning how to memorize and regurgitate - but not comprehend - information for it. Pre-med students don't care whether they understand the material they take in school, as long as they pass the MCAT and pull the GPA that they need for the med school they want to go to.

This is not the way we should select who our new doctors will be. We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers. Cheaters like this are exactly what the MCAT is pretty well looking for - people who will do just the right amount of work to pass the test, without bothering to comprehend the information that it is supposed to be testing people on.

We are screening for automatons when we should be screening for thinkers.

Please tell me how you can efficiently screen for this. For current med school freshmen in the AAMC schools, there were 42742 applicants (31834 of whom were first-time applicants). There were 18665 matriculants. (Source [aamc.org]) The MCAT allows schools to reject clearly unqualified applicants out of hand, while interviewing a group of people that actually stand a good chance of doing well.

Pre-med students are merely training for what life is like in med school, and they are demonstrating adaptive behaviors for tho

Cheating in college is rampant, it's just that most people are good at it.

Like how you'll study your ass off at a test and get a 30, which was pretty high all things considered, then there's a group of Chinese students that get 100 on it but can't answer even basic questions about the material if you come to them and ask them since they did so.

Or how companies complain that they'll hire an engineer who will have a degree and good GPA but doesn't even have a basic grasp of how their field of en

Well, that does happen, but that's what the technical portion of interviews are for. Get a group of three or four engineers asking simple, rapid-fire questions about the field. You'll find out real quick whether or not your candidate knows their stuff. I swear to God, I've seen "engineers" who couldn't solve a quadratic equation without a calculator, or who thought Ohm's law was V = I/R.

Well, I think there's a bit of a difference. When something's wrong with a computer, there's little harm in the tech googling for the best answer, asking experts, reading manuals... When there's something wrong with a patient, I'd rather have a doc who KNOWS what to do to make sure the patient doesn't need a toe tag before he comes up with a solution.

Regardless of their field of expertise, no professional on Earth can be expected to know all the answers off the top of their head. However every professional should be expected to know how to find the answer in a timely manner. Debugging a human is much more difficult than debugging a PC, so for MD's in particular this often includes "reading manuals" or referring the patient to a specialist (ie: "asking experts").

Lots tests are based on cramming for the test and lead to people who can pass the test but they are clueless on what the test covers.

The tests are designed to be cost-effective, not insightful.

Take this FA as an example: select people that don't think much and the "security" is so much cheaper. As for the persons that do think (graduates or not)... heck, name them hackers and be done with them, they don't make good consumers.

Indeed, and cramming is a legitimate response if not the desired one. The same goes for all those high value tests, GRE, MCAT, TOEFL, SAT, ACT etc.

I'd personally have no ethical qualms teaching students strategies for maximizing their scores, mainly because that's what everybody else is going and the tests themselves do nothing to discourage it. But, cheating is a completely different matter.

I'd personally have no ethical qualms teaching students strategies for maximizing their scores,

I would, if teaching them strategies to maximize their score competes on the time available to teach them what is actually needed (among others, how to think! Especially critical thinking seems to be let aside today's "education"; sometimes I feel this is on purpose, until Hanlon's Razor pops into my mind).